bigbandluva wrote:
The thing is that I would recieve a working product would I have downloaded it instead. Would I hade decided to get the game from TPB instead of the store I would probably had had a nice evening last night, instead of this shit. It's not right, IMHO.

But if you'd had the internet connection to download said game you'd also have an activated, working game from the legit copy, no?

Why not? You're hardly going to win an argument by being obtuse. It just makes you look as if you don't actually have a point and other people will assume they've won, and you're just too much of a wendy to admit it.

RobTheBuilder wrote:
As with all piracy versus DRM debates does this not come down to the same few things as always?:

1. Piracy is a massive problem

2. However, to presume that all pirates will buy a game if they cannot pirate it is ludicrous.

3. DRM is a pain in the ass that makes little difference to piracy, but annoys real customers.

There is actually a principle at stake here as well. I don't think anyone thinks all pirates would buy the game if they didn't download it, but that doesn't mean they should just get what they want for free.

@kalel I agree, but given DRM makes little difference as to whether they do or not, punishing those who DO buy the game seems wrong.

I also wonder what links there are between piracy and game buying.
As with music, where those who copy actually spend far more on music than those who don't.

Maybe in many cases, pirating games leads to buying more games at a later date.

For example: When I was younger, myself and other people used to always get given pirated games. We simply didn't have the money to buy them, so we copied them.

However, pirating those games helped to make me a lifelong fan of gaming, and those pirated games are part of the reason I have been buying games ever since, and haven't pirated a game in probably a decade or more.

PenguinJim wrote:
I don't have another point. It all seems to speak (or possibly scream) for itself.

I'll throw The Witcher 2 into the mix though. (That's a PC game from last year, darkmorgado)

But I'm not going to spell that one out, either.

Well you sort of did, because you typed it

But if we're going to talk about Witcher 2, I feel obliged to point out that CD Projekt have said it was pirated several million times, compared to about 1 million legitimate sales.

So it's not quite a ringing endorsement for stating that DRM-free encourages legitimate purchases.

But people who pirate games are unlikely to buy everything they pirate.

I recently watched a dodgy copy of mission impossible ghost protocol but there was no way in hell I'd have bought a copy of it so they didn't lose a sale. If its free people will download something for the sake of it, like people do with demos. I downloaded tribes and team fortress 2 as they are free to play, played them for 30 minutes each and unlikely to ever touch them again. Suppose these weren't f2p and were actually pirated, would that mean both games had lost a sale? Of course not as I would never have paid for them

PenguinJim wrote:
I don't have another point. It all seems to speak (or possibly scream) for itself.

I'll throw The Witcher 2 into the mix though. (That's a PC game from last year, darkmorgado)

But I'm not going to spell that one out, either.

Well you sort of did, because you typed it

But if we're going to talk about Witcher 2, I feel obliged to point out that CD Projekt have said it was pirated several million times, compared to about 1 million legitimate sales.

So it's not quite a ringing endorsement for stating that DRM-free encourages legitimate purchases.

But people who pirate games are unlikely to buy everything they pirate.

I agree, but the argument works both ways, which is my point. There's also little to suggest beyond conjecture that removing DRM entirely would lead to a sales increase. So arguing either way is purely speculative and it's a question that can never be answered because, due to the nature of the problem, there will never be any solid data to go on.

I believe the pirates are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride to make it easier. Let the pirate's laughter remind us how we used to be...

darkmorgado wrote:
I agree, but the argument works both ways, which is my point. There's also little to suggest beyond conjecture that removing DRM entirely would lead to a sales increase. So arguing either way is purely speculative and it's a question that can never be answered because, due to the nature of the problem, there will never be any solid data to go on.

I think the way both Steam (limited hassle these days) and GOG are quite good examples of how well games sell when you make them less of a pain in the arse for the customer. You also have lots of limited or DRM free models in the indy scene to observe, some of which suffer from piracy more than others depending on their approach.

I do wonder though what percentage of Steam (and GoG, but less so) purchases are simply for games that have been discounted by ridiculous amounts. A large amount of the games on there are actually pretty expensive when they're not on a sale.

PenguinJim wrote:
I don't blame people for knee-jerk-reacting and thinking DRM is a direct result of piracy.

Aw, how generous of you. Thanks.

I believe it is a direct result of piracy. That doesn't mean I'm so naive as to think the many other advantages don't occur to devs and publishers and play a role, but fundamentally it was engineered around that issue.

It's no cleverer to leap to the deeply cynical point of view than it is to think everyone in this world is honest and righteous.

bitch_tits_zero_nine wrote:
Yep, I mean I grew up taping music off the radio and films off television.

I see piracy as kind of an extension of that in terms of criminality.

You can see it how you want, but that's a bit of a stretch.

it's more comparable to loading up a C90 with spectrum games at a mate's, but even at the age of 6 I knew that was wrong.

Heh, I guess you're the better man. It didn't help that I used to work for a software developer and everybody else used to pirate, including the development tools and system software by the company itself.

I think there is a bit of a grey area around stuff being publicly broadcast and recording it, then sharing it, possibly on a torrent to the world... I believe nobody has been taken to court over this yet.

But the lengths you have to go to these days to pirate software with hacking and jail-breaking etc etc. It's not really a grey area.